eskimosoup are on the move

eskimosoup have just signed the lease to a new lovely office in the Hull Maltings a former Victorian brewery. It's a fantastic old brick building and we can't wait to move in! Situated next to a nice garden area, Hull New Theatre and not too far the denture repair centre sadly now closed.

Stand by for new address details.

Success with OWEN

After the success of our first two training days with OWEN we have been asked to deliver our Confidence through comedy and The Web for Beginners workshops once again.

The OWEN project (Older Workers Employment Network) specialises in supporting people over the age of 45 back into work.

OWEN first approached us through the Hull Comedy Festival (we are the organisers and John Gilbert our Marketing Director is also the festival Director) to create an interactive and useful workshop tackling confidence for older people when they are in a job interview and work based situations. Due to our delivery style OWEN commissioned us once again to deliver a beginners guide to the Web.

Holderness Grange TV ad campaign

Hot off the press our newest campaign 9.40am this morning in the break of Jeremy Kyle

If you need to reach a large target audience quickly television can do just that. With an intelligent approach and a good understanding of your audience a TV advertising campaign can still be a great way to market your product or service. Holderness Grange is a beautiful lifestyle village for the over 55s with two bedroom apartments starting from £110,000. When we first visited Holderness grange we wanted to move in!

A Masters Degree in Social Media Marketing?

Students will now be able to take a Masters degree in 'Social Media', with the University of Salford insisting that the course can give real-world skills and experience.

Although it should come as little surprise that people will now have the option to have an MA in Facebook and Twitter, the course is apparently aimed to produce the next generation of PRs and marketers.

Course leader Professor Ben Light said: "Social media is often associated with photos and statuses on Facebook," he said. "But there's a massive potential for it to bring communities together, whether they're geographical or online.

"We feel that social media can be a way of doing social good and by giving students the skills and experience to implement effective technology and strategies, we hope they'll be able to make a difference."

Flexible and fast evolving

"Social media is a flexible and fast evolving phenomenon," he said.

"So careers in this subject will be hugely varied as well. What we can say, is that knowledge of high quality production and communication techniques will enable people to create powerful campaigns – whether for commercial or social reasons."

TechRadar will probably not be attending the course as we are too fully focused on our Doctorate in YouTube for such frivolities. But we do like the idea of doing a 140-character dissertation.

Original Source http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/article.aspx?cp-documentid=147921274

Playing B-Ball in the sun

We have to take the best advantage of the sun when it appears between long periods of rain and cloud cover. Four of the Director Team (Minus John), Chris, Hannah, Phill and George getting the most of a Saturday afternoon playing some the most worst basketball ever seen.

Partnership Marketing in the NHS

I attended yesterday (9th June 2009) the inaugural NHS Membership Conference presented by NHS Hull.

Reflecting on this, I think it’s fair to say that the event was a success. It was well attended by 70 – 80 senior NHS representatives, mostly from PCTs. The multiple speakers presented a lot of practical advice and ideas that participants could apply, if implementing their own membership scheme.

As a delegate and sponsor of the conference, I listened with interest to find some great examples of marketing at work in the NHS. Given that my company has provided services for NHS Hull’s Membership Scheme and We’re All Ears programme, it would be rather crass to point out projects we’ve been involved in.

So, it was very welcome when I sat in on a workshop presented by Carla Ramsay of Hull & East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, along with Katie Colrein and Rachel Iveson of Humber Mental Health Teaching NHS Trust. This described a way of working that we’d had no direct input in ourselves.

Here I learnt about an excellent example of partnership marketing in the NHS. Identifying the potential problem of communication overload to the public within Hull and the East Riding, the Trust’s were, along with NHS Hull’s Membership Team, able to pool their resources to develop an effective communications campaign. A campaign that would mean that all participating trusts would go on to smash their individual membership recruitment targets.

In a nutshell, the philosophy was if we are going to sign people up to be members, let’s try to get them for three trusts rather than just one. If this works consistently, we’ll pretty much reduce our recruitment investment for this campaign to a third of what it would if we did them separately. This also benefits the public who aren’t being approached by three times as many NHS organisations wanting them to become members.

By implementing a shared membership recruitment initiative, the trusts were able to benefit from saving time, saving money, avoiding conflicts, e.g. events clashing, share knowledge, events and share information on the goals and challenges of each trust so the right priorities were given to all involved.

There were some great specific benefits too, for example: recruiting members for a mental health trust can be difficult because of the stigmas attached to this area of health. However, by fronting approaches by “care you get from a hospital” it was more acceptable for people to stop on talk with representatives at supermarkets, at special events, etc. and be hooked into mental health as the discussions develop.

The result of this partnership marketing campaign was a recruitment of around 3,000 members per trust. This is pretty impressive considering the targets for all marketing activities were between 2,500 and 5,000.

So, why am I hyping up what might seems so straightforward? Simply because I haven’t seen this before. The campaign is an excellent example of entrepreneurial thinking within huge NHS organisations. The entrepreneur’s approach to marketing typically asks; how can I take who I know, what they want, and then leverage this to my advantage so that we both get what we want?

This approach delivers this and wins for each trust, the NHS members, the Chief Executives seeking Foundation Status or World Class Commissioning, and where savings are made ultimately the taxpayer benefits too.

I’m not suggesting that the NHS is without its entrepreneurial thinkers; there were a couple of others speakers at the event too – I suggest they know who they are. However, it is refreshing to see this adopted by teams at multiple organisations.

At the workshop I attended, the Q&A session moved away from the benefits, and became a little embroiled in NHS politics. Though for what its worth I feel I “got it” and congratulate those involved for an innovative approach to partnership marketing, with a hint of entrepreneurialism!

Notes from the workshop along with other resources from the NHS Membership Conference will be available to download for free at www.nhsmembershiphull.co.uk by the end of this week.